Etching and scraping, circa 1945. 113x80 mm; 4 1/2x3 1/4 inches, full margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this scarce etching.
Ryan (1889-1954) began creating prints in the early 1940s, and at Atelier 17, she learned to make etchings and color woodcuts in a 1945 class taught by Louis Schanker. Ryan learned the white-line woodcut technique, innovated by printmakers in Provincetown around 1915 who were inspired by 19th century Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts and carved their designs onto a single block, rather than multiple blocks as in the western printmaking tradition, inking each section with a different color. The small grooves between each segment create the distinctive white lines of these woodcuts. However, Ryan opted for black paper, creating the "black line" woodcut (see previous lot).
According to Holland Carter, in a review of Ryan's work published in The New York Times, May 4, 2007, "Ryan was a self-starter. In 1923 she left a marriage in New Jersey for the life of a poet and journalist, traveling alone to Europe and then settling in Greenwich Village, where she opened a restaurant to support her children (and did the cooking herself). She began painting in 1938, when she was almost 50. In 1941 she enrolled in Stanley William Hayter's printmaking workshop and learned everything: etching, intaglio, monotype, woodcut and printing and carving on plaster."
